Second Nature by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Patricia Coyne, Jamie’s mom, had offered Jamie’s slim wedding band for Joey, as well as the gold locket given to Gia by Jamie as a first-anniversary gift, to be the traditional “something old” for the bride’s regalia. Martin Coyne, Sicily’s paternal grandfather, would walk her across the lawn to the arbor. Marie would be the something blue, sitting there with all the other relatives. Sicily’s parents had the advantage of being saints. And so, from now on, the thing to do, Marie thought, was to present that news chick’s face, still downright perky, even though she knew—she could actually feel some days—that her very posture was eloquent with a hurt she had never expected to experience.
    There was one more emotion, perhaps the one that caught Marie by surprise with the least warning. And it was her mourning for Sicily’s face. Wearing their grandmother’s ancient satin with one hundred and ten buttons up the bodice, Gia had been a bride fairer than the calla lilies she carried. Sicily was taller and stronger through the shoulders, but in a strapless sheath, that cascade of hair twined and tendriled … oh, Sicily would have been a stunner, a bride to outshine—no.
    No.
    The secret to living Marie’s life was keeping it squarely in the present, not letting herself be borne back along too many rivers with banks shrouded in the softening fog of time.
    “I’m not wearing any mommy-of-the bride gear,” Marie repeated, letting her voice rise up to shrill on purpose, nudging-and-not-nudging, making an elaborate business of jangling through the wood-and-aluminum hangers she favored.
    Her closet was “finished,” as was Sicily’s, with a ridiculous expanse of drawers, shelves, and grottoes. Sicily always said that the number of pairs of shoes Marie owned gave her the raw urge to rush to the Red Cross and donate blood. One pair was silver; the other forty were black. And of those forty, probably fifteen were ballet flats that would have been indistinguishable to anyone but Marie, distinct only by their labels, identifying them as having been made by different Italians.
    When Sicily didn’t respond, Marie went on, “I don’t have anything like that, Sicily! Not for tonight, not for August.”

    “I can’t fry an egg,” Sicily announced. “I’m hopeless at huevos.” She had come into Marie’s room and was sitting on the round African bride stool that Marie kept in her closet so that she could slip her stockings on without running them. “I can draw a good greenstick fracture though. And I’m hell on a skull fracture. How many skull fractures will I draw in my life, you think? They’re a favorite subject for lawsuits.”
    “I wouldn’t underestimate a good greenstick fracture,” Marie said. “Or a skull fracture either.”
    “You don’t have to play mother of the bride,” Sicily said.
    “Well, good,” Marie answered, biting her lip. “Fine. I’m glad it’s not a big deal.” So there. So what? Sicily was only acknowledging what Marie had already admitted. “I look like shit in lavender.”
    “Auntie, what I really mean is that you don’t have to playact. It doesn’t matter what you wear, because everyone knows you’re mother of the bride.” Sicily, twenty pounds heavier and five inches taller than Marie, grasped her aunt’s shoulders and gently brushed her mouth against Marie’s eyes, in a parody of Marie’s ritual good-night kiss. “You’re not the only mother I’ve ever had, Marie. But you’re the only mother I ever will have.”
    A great hollow barrel rolled through Marie’s stomach, part sweet satisfaction, part desolate longing for Gia. Gia would have been the mother God created for ceremonies such as these. How she would have delighted in tiny flourishes—little place cards made by hand, each with a tiny ribbon dangling a fairy slipper and a teeny black tuxedo shoe, a cloud-shaped poster decorated with the collected evolution of Joey and Sicily, from gap-toothed